


Fragments

by SilverDagger



Category: Claymore
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Post-Pieta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-10
Updated: 2016-07-10
Packaged: 2018-07-22 15:34:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,335
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7444501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SilverDagger/pseuds/SilverDagger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's the little things that remind them who they are.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragments

**Author's Note:**

> This one came of wondering what the heck the warriors do in their free time other than spar, but of course it ended up being sad.

The first year after the battle of Pieta is a hard one, but not because Miria and her soldiers don't know how to survive.

They're self-sufficient. Cold doesn't trouble them. Game is scarce, but they hunt well and eat seldom, and Cynthia and Yuma keep talking about starting a garden come spring. Miria, despite her more cautious instincts, is inclined to allow it. There are places where such a thing can be hidden, and few humans or warriors venture so far north any longer, now that there's nothing left but ruins, ghosts and monsters. But other things, human things – cloth or metal, ceramic, glass – these, they needed to take. 

Miria feels like a grave robber, picking through the ruins of dead towns for useable goods, anything they can salvage. It isn't even necessary for survival. But the truth is this – out here in all this wilderness, after turning their backs on the rules they've always lived by, they need _something_ to remind themselves they they're – not human, no. Miria isn't naive enough to lie to herself like that. Not human, but not yoma either. _That's_ why they need molasses and tea leaves, ribbons for Cynthia's hair and Tabitha's blue mug with flowers painted along the edge. Not for luxury, but because some walls are too thin to trust, without something small and foolish to shore them up.

And as the days pass, and survival becomes a less pressing concern, she learns things about all of them.

Tabitha is quiet. She likes tea and craftwork, embroidery and the like, more fanciful than useful. She mostly watches, mostly listens, and it's hard to say what she's thinking – but what she doesn't say in words, she marks down in thread and color, and Miria feels a twinge of melancholy at the thought that anyone who stumbles on their cave after they've vacated it will find alongside their supplies a collection of floral designs and delicately stitched animals, most of which have never existed outside of fairy tales.

Cynthia disappears one morning while they're searching the ruins of another village for traces of Clare's boy, and comes back with an armful of books that might have belonged to a doctor, judging by the long treatises on medicinal herbs and the impressively detailed anatomical sketches. She reads them at night, frowning and muttering to herself and scribbling notes in the margins, then goes back and reads them again. Helen experiments with cooking, when there's anything to cook, and hones her skills in cheerful complaining otherwise.

The first time after the battle that Tabitha says anything she doesn't have to is when she sees Deneve flipping through a book of poetry, not stolen but written in her own angular hand. She says it's more sentiment than she would have expected from Deneve, and Helen laughs and says that's just because none of them know her very well. Miria listens, sees the way Deneve almost smiles before she can stop herself, and she thinks that perhaps they're beginning to know her better. 

Yuma, of all people, has a surprising collection of ghost stories, and she'll tell them if you ask her and promise not to laugh. No one ever does. Tales of drowned lovers and murderers' severed hands scratching at the door might have seemed childish in the world below, but here and now all their ghosts seem too present, and something about Yuma's quiet, hesitant speech makes her words all the harder to shake off. Miria has wondered, from time to time, if it's true that the dead return. She's never been able to settle the question of whether she wants to believe it or not.

Clare... Clare keeps her solitude, silent as a ghost herself. While she's training, she's _there_ – focused, quick on her feet and quick with her thoughts, uncompromising. Once she puts her sword away, she seems to fall into a stupor, wrapped too deeply in her own grief to look beyond it to the world around her. Miria knows that the only way out of that mire is through it, but every time she looks at Clare looking lost, she wants to shake her and tell her things it would do her no good to hear – _you're not the only one who's lost someone_ , and _pull yourself out of it_ , and most of all, _don't you dare follow her_.

Not that there's any danger of that – not until she finds that child, if he's still alive to find. Miria has her doubts, but she's grateful to that boy all the same for chaining Clare to this world until she remembers how to see something other than sorrow.

And one day, Miria sees her sitting on a rock overlooking Pieta's ruins, playing a wooden flute. It's a simple tune, and there are more than a handful of missed notes, but there's something soft and mournful about it that Miria can't tear herself away from.

After the song ends, Clare looks up, and the fog is gone from her eyes. It isn't anger that Miria sees instead, or anything so simple as grief; she looks like her thoughts are fixed on a point a long way away, past or future, unreachable.

“You were listening,” she says. Miria can't tell if it's meant as a rebuke or not. 

“I was,” she admits. She leaps for Clare's perch, catches the ledge with one hand and swings herself up and over, waiting for Clare to object or simply leave. She never does, but she says nothing else either until Miria says, “I didn't know you were a musician.”

“I'm not,” Clare says. After a long time, she adds, “Jean taught me. I never saw much point, but – it mattered to her.”

Miria looks down on the snow-covered town and the unmarked graves there, and chances a question she never would have asked before. “You were playing for her?”

Clare looks at her sharply, and for an instant Miria can think only of flashing blades and the white arc of a killing smile, the startling brilliance of blood on snow. But that much is part of all of them, and not even close to the whole. 

“Maybe,” Clare says slowly. “I don't know.”

Miria remembers rain-shrouded hills, her own blade drawn and sharp, her hands stained with the blood of what should have been only one more monster. And she remembers ribbons and paper, imaginary beasts, the promise of a garden when the snow is gone. They need more than survival. More than purpose.

“I don't think you have to,” she says. “But don't throw that away.”

That night, Clare is silent again, and the night after that, and the next. They train, they hunt, they spar, and Clare moves through it all with deadly intent. She haunts the mountains and plains, searching, and returns empty-handed, unchanged except for the blood that sometimes mars her skin and her cloak. She spends as little time as she can in the company of others, until a storm picks up and pins them in their cave, and company is inescapable.

That night, Yuma tells a story about a spirit that lurks at crossroads and challenges travelers to a contest of riddles with their life as the prize. Tabitha sips tea, and Helen and Deneve sit shoulder to shoulder against the cave wall, Helen for once fallen silent. Cynthia underlines a passage in one of her books, carefully, as if she might one day have some use for it. And when the story is over and the lantern burning low, the wind howls outside like an army of the dead, and even Miria wraps herself in her cloak and tries not to lose herself in things that cannot be changed.

The night wears on. Snow piles up, covering over the remains of towns somewhere below, and leaves them in a small circle of light bounded by wind and silence. And off to the side, sitting half in shadow, Clare takes out her flute and begins to play.


End file.
